Well, if you listened to the journalist on Democracy Now this morning who's
written an article in The Guardian, it wasn't a 2 trillion dollar bill. It is a
6 trillion dollar bill with all kinds of financial bailouts for hedge funds and
financial firms, banks, and corporations, all hidden and disguised, all agreed
to by our progressive champions like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. In
comparison, that 500 billion dollar bailout that Bernie was complaining about
Wednesday night, is nothing! And those bastards, giving people one miserable
check for twelve hundred dollars! But you know, people are easily fooled and
manipulated. Look, all those idiots voted for Joe Biden because they believed
all the lies that the party leaders told about him, especially the Democratic
Black leaders. And half the time, when pieces of the truth dribble out, people
don't believe them. Both my daughter and my home health aide heard clips of
the woman who had been an aide to Joe Biden in the 90's, describe his treatment
of her and both immediately disbelieved her. My daughter thought she was a
plant from the Trump campaign. My aide thought she was making the allegation
for self serving reasons. There was enough information in what they both heard
to indicate that she was telling the truth and not being self serving, but they
didn't hear it. Then later, I heard the whole long interview that Katie Halper
did with her and it was obvious that she was telling the truth, not a plant,
and not self serving. But people are adrift in a sea of lies.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Roger Loran Bailey
(Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Friday, March 27, 2020 12:40 PM
To: blind-democracy <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>; Trisha Hart
<trisha.angel.my.heart80@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] Capitalism’s coronavirus response: Bail out the rich!
https://socialistaction.org/2020/03/26/capitalisms-coronavirus-response-bail-out-the-rich/
Capitalism’s coronavirus response: Bail out the rich!
Socialist Action / 21 hours ago
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell gives the thumbs up after speaking on
the bailout bill in the Senate on Wednesday. (Getty Images) By JOHN POTTINGER
Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap
off tall buildings in a single bound! Superman? No, it’s the U.S.
and the world capitalist economies. Or is it?
As more states and more counties mandate stay-in-place orders more and more
people are out of jobs to the tune of perhaps 13 to 20 percent, compared to ten
percent unemployment at the nadir of the 2008 Great Recession. Additional
millions were rendered partially employed. As for the Gross Domestic Product
(GDP), an optimistic forecast (optimistic is a relative term) by Warwick
McKibbin, an economist at the Australian National University who modeled the
SARS pandemic, estimated that the coronavirus might kill 236,000 people in the
US while shrinking the GDP by 2 percent.
But if the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention numbers are correct
1,000,000 people could die and the GDP could fall by 8.4 percent.
Goldman Sachs, not to be outdone, said GDP could drop 24 percent for the second
quarter. (Goldman Sachs counts dollars not lives.) Donald Trump suggests the
same. “Restart the economy by Easter, he states (NYT, March
25.) Profits before people!
For now, millions of people staying home with no paychecks. It means schools,
libraries, restaurants, bars, all sporting events, concerts, dentist offices,
barbers, hairdressers and many more are closed. Better this, of course, than
Trump’s unthinkable back to work solutions – at the peak of the curve, no doubt!
The pandemic also brought on a stock market crash which means among other
things that people who were going to buy a house or to a lesser extent a car or
SUV, won’t be able to do so because their down payment had been in the stock
market. On the up side the air is cleaner because no one is driving or flying.
So what’s the response from the federal government? Well the Democrats and
Republicans knee-jerk response is to throw money at the big banks.
The New York Federal Reserve is offering $1 trillion for overnight loans and $1
trillion more in 14-day loans. All for the corporate elite at near zero percent
interest rates. The Fed is also buying $500 billion in Treasury bonds and
snapping up mortgage-backed securities – all with printed paper money, as usual.
Meanwhile on Capital Hill Congress plans a $2 trillion stimulus package;
$425 billion for “distressed companies,” $75 billion to airlines and hotels,
$100 billion for hospitals, $150 billion to state and local governments, $350
billion in loans for small businesses, oh, and yes,
$1,200 to workers who make up to $75,000, plus $500 per child. Don’t spend it
all in one place.
So quite unlike Medicare for All, the bourgeois press and the bourgeois
politicians seem to think turning on the tap and printing money is now OK.
While $1,200 checks are a start and more money for the poor and unemployed is
good, where will the rest of the cash go?
Will the airlines spend it on wages or perhaps on buying a “distressed
competitor?” Will it prioritize jobs that produce real value or the further
concentration of finance capital to eliminate competition to drive up declining
profit rates?
Where’s the $500 billion the Fed spent on Treasury bonds going? Are they going
to tip the waiter or fund the big corporations’ line of credit?
Will printing more money lead to inflation or perhaps an asset bubble more
likely to burst? Ernest Mandel had the answer in his “Marxist Economic Theory
Vol. 2,” page 527, “The increase in the public debt has simply replaced
(concealed) direct currency inflation. Instead of appearing in the form of an
increased amount of fiduciary money* in circulation, it appears in that of an
increase in the fictitious
capital** constituted by public debt securities. But the total stock of
currency is swollen exactly as if there had been an issue of paper money.” In
other words, all this money being thrown at the bourgeoisie over the course of
time will end up in speculation – in capitalism’s ever increasing casino-like
economy of over priced shares, mortgage-backed securities, assorted financial
instruments, and who knows what. The capitalist could invest in making widgets
but with mass unemployment who will buy them?
What now? In the short term working people need a moratorium on all evictions,
foreclosures, rent, mortgages, utility payments, debt payments, credit card
payments and student loan payments. But we will never be really safe until the
banks and big corporations are nationalized under the control of working
people, where we can collectively and democratically construct a planned
economy that operates for human need not capitalist profit. We need a workers’
government that plans for socialism and for that we need a revolutionary party.
Join us!
* Fiduciary money is money backed by trust between the payer and payee, like
the $20 bill that was in your pocket until you were lay off.
** Fictitious capital is value, in the form of shares, debt, speculative
instruments, etc., above and beyond what can be realized in the form of
commodities. With average profit rates derived from workers’ labor power
consistently in decline over the past several decades, capitalists increasing
invest their profits not in new production that creates real value but rather
in banks and related financial institutions that “invest” in speculative
instruments that have little or no correspondence to the production of
commodities.
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March 26, 2020 in Uncategorized.
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Neil deGrasse Tyson
“God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance.”
― Neil DeGrasse Tyson
